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His Dark Materials: The Subtle Knife

Will is twelve, and he’s just killed a man. Now he’s on the run, determined to discover the truth about his missing father. But as he races through the streets of Oxford, desperately seeking sanctuary, he steps through a window into another world.

Cittagazze is a strange and unsettling place, where deadly soul-eating Spectres haunt the city streets, and the wingbeats of distant angels sound against the sky. Soon Will finds himself with a companion: a strange, savage girl called Lyra who is searching for something called Dust. But she and Will have not met by accident. Their paths will take them to the eerie Torre degli Angeli, where they must find a powerful and secret object that people from many worlds would kill to possess…

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Authors

Philip Pullman is probably the world’s most acclaimed living children’s author, best known for the trilogy of books known as His Dark Materials.

Awards

Philip won the Nestle Smarties award for both Clockwork and The Firework Maker’s Daughter. Northern Lights was published in hardback in July 1995. That year, it won the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and was Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

The Amber Spyglass won WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year 2000 at the British Book Awards, was Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal and was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2001. Philip Pullman was voted Whitaker Author of the Year by the Booksellers Association. The Amber Spyglass went on to win both Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 and in doing so became the first children’s book to win the main prize in the award’s history.

Philip has also been recognised with two major awards for his contribution to literature: the Eleanor Farjeon award in 2002, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize in 2005.